So did Lives of Others register with Academy voters last month because of the underlying comparison to the Bush Administration’s wiretapping policy?I’m guessing it had more to do with superior storytelling, but I haven’t had the chance to see it yet.
Here’s an interesting look at the East German Stasi from the German Financial Times.
Film on Stasi stirs new interest in history
von Hugh Williamson
(Berlin)Millions of people have opened their Stasi files to be shocked by Intimate details of how secret agents recruited hundreds of thousands of informers to spy on innocent citizens.
On Sunday in Hollywood it picked up the Oscar for best foreign language film. Yesterday in the grey, east Berlin suburb of Lichtenberg the Movie The Lives of Others revived emotional memories of how the Stasi, communist East Germany's secret police, ruined the lives of millions.
The prize for the film, that captures the evil skill of one of the communist era's most determined - and feared - spy agencies, was welcomed by visitors to the former Stasi headquarters in this sprawling Berlin district.Christiana Barzik, a middle-aged West German tourist, said the film, about a Stasi agent who in the 1980s bugs the home of two artists and develops an unexpected sympathy for them, was a breakthrough.
"It's good that a German film has finally dealt seriously with such a sensitive issue," she said, standing among exhibits of spying equipment - hidden in watering cans, briefcases and overcoats - in the communist regime's rather threadbare former spy centre that was also a location for the award-winning movie.
"The film really hits home emotionally on how ingenious, and evil, the Stasi were," said Gisle Raasberg, a Norwegian who has seen it twice.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, an easterner, said the "sensitively produced Stasi drama had . . . touched people deeply".
Millions of people have, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, opened their Stasi files, to be shocked by intimate details of how secret agents recruited hundreds of thousands of informers to spy on innocent citizens.
The film, the first by the west German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, has won extra resonance given recent revelations in Poland over church leaders' ties to the communist secret police, and worries in the US and elsewhere over civil liberty breaches due to tougher anti-terror laws.
Mr von Donnersmarck, 33, said recently that many people in the US who had seen the film had told him of parallels to concerns over increased state-backed eavesdropping in the US as an anti-terror measure.
Wolfgang Thierse, deputy president of Germany's parliament and a respected east German politician, said the film had an international appeal.
"The underlying themes of repression, cowardice, anxiety and alienation are not unique to the
Stasi or East Germany," he said.
He said many West Germans with little interest in unification themes "have also been touched by the film" which, with a budget of only $1.8m ($1.2m), has been seen by 1.7m people in Germany and launched successfully in France and Denmark.
Film satirizes Japan's economic bubble
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-bubble28feb28,1,5488027.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
By BRUCE WALLACE,
Los Angeles Times
In Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust, a movie now playing in Japan, a heroine travels back in time to the country's heady days of economic expansion and consumer excess – which ended with a thud, a turnabout that still haunts the Japanese today.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-bubble28feb28,1,5488027.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
By BRUCE WALLACE,
Los Angeles Times
In Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust, a movie now playing in Japan, a heroine travels back in time to the country's heady days of economic expansion and consumer excess – which ended with a thud, a turnabout that still haunts the Japanese today.
"It was a weird period of history," says Chihiro Kameyama, the film's producer.
Fuji Television Network TOKYO – Japanese audiences can be excused for feeling nostalgia for the 1980s while watching Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust, a movie about those champagne days when a man could drape a Tiffany necklace around the neck of a woman he had just met and friends would tell her to take it because "everyone's got too much money anyway."
Japan's bubble era seems surreal in hindsight: too much cash, too much consumption and zero recognition of the recklessness of those days. It ended in tears, of course. Real estate prices collapsed. Banks failed. And Japan embarked on a long period of economic stagnation.
Only in the past two years have economists declared the lost decade over, pointing to jumps in corporate profits and the vigor of Japanese stock markets. To the makers of Bubble Fiction," the economic recovery signaled that the time had arrived for a satirical look at this national trauma.
They figured that each new bit of happy economic news makes Japanese audiences better equipped to look back at their folly with amusement instead of anguish.
"If we had made this movie five years ago, it would have been a much darker comedy," said Yasuo Baba, the director. "Even last year, when the script was approved, we asked ourselves if it was an appropriate theme. There are many people out there who were burned by the bubble and still have bad feelings about it."
It's still a soft recovery -- incomes remain virtually static -- and the word "bubble" still frequently pops up in conversations here. The experience has been seared onto the consciousness of a generation now in its late 30s, 40s and 50s, much the way the Great Depression's misery dictated a lifetime of cautious spending habits for the millions it touched.
"People were spend-happy in the bubble days," Baba said. "If you were a newly hired salaryman, the first thing you did was buy an Armani suit. But in the last 10 years, Japan has raised a generation that will not spend. It's not an economic issue. It's psychological."
Baba knows the bubble era well, though he said he was not badly burned financially. His career was built on three hit romantic comedies made in the 1980s that captured the social essence of that time. After a bit of a lost decade of his own during which he drew lots of manga but made only one movie, Baba has returned to that period with Bubble Fiction.
The movie was made by Fuji TV, a conglomerate known for entertainment values and a finger on the public mood. For all the movie's cartoonish violence and lack of serious pretensions (the plot involves time travel to 1990 in a washing machine), it does offer a populist view of Japan's current troubles.
The movie opens with a debt collector harassing a woman named Mayumi at a funeral parlor as she grieves for her mother. He helps himself to the money in the condolence tray, an eerie reminder of the notoriously heavy-handed collection methods of Japan's loan companies. Desperate to get out of debt, Mayumi agrees to go back to 1990 on behalf of a small group of bureaucrats. They want her to correct the bad political decision that popped the bubble and will, if left untreated, push 21st century Japan into bankruptcy and a social implosion.
And it's in 1990 we find the villains: foreign bankers and their Japanese collaborators in business and government who are orchestrating a collapse so they can scoop up assets on the cheap. This has strong echoes of the current mood in Japan, where there is much muttering about foreign "vulture" capital firms buying fire-sale assets of buildings, golf courses and the like, and reselling them at a profit. In a reversal of the bubble era, when Japanese firms were picking off American landmarks, these days U.S. hedge funds scour Japan for bargain pearls.
This is the calamity that Bubble Fiction tries to undo with its time-travel trick. In the end, with the evil Japanese bureaucrat and his foreign cronies exposed, and the bubble's bust averted, Mayumi returns to a different Japan of 2007. Prosperity has continued unbroken. Family values are still strong. Japan even has won a soccer World Cup.
"We spent the most money on that last scene," said Chihiro Kameyama, the film's producer. "It is what Japan could have been, a richer, more fun place to be. "But the movie was not made with nostalgia," he added. "It was a weird period of history, and Japanese people know there is nothing to go back to. It was a bubble. And they know it had consequences."
